Get account control now –or risk a career of continual social media sanitation. To match the growing consumer adoption of social media, many companies have launched social media efforts with little planning. As social media spreads beyond corporate communications and marketing, business groups are deploying social media without a standardized process. In fact, enterprise class corporations (those with over 1,000 employees) have an average of 178 social media accounts and this number will only grow if left unchecked. Companies that don’t control these accounts are at risk of having abandoned accounts, lack of consistent experience, or untrained employees creating a crisis.

This report puts companies in control based on business needs.
Buyers are confused by the number of vendors claiming similar offerings, and as a result spend months making decisions on who to short list. To fast forward the industry, this report serves to accelerate the process, this report contains the following elements:

A Thorough Methodology: including 71 interviews, a survey to 144 buyers, a survey to 27 vendors, and analysis from a dedicated research team. Read page 4 for more details

Five Business Use Cases: Based on interviews with buyers, we sought to find out their needs, rather than focus on software features.

Altimeter Radar: a decision-making matrix that will help buyers to determine which vendors are best for them.

Pragmatic Guide: At the end of the report, we feature 11 steps with examples and pitfalls to avoid guide all buyers must complete.

A resource checklist: buyers should use to ensure that they make the best decision with regard to their social media.

This is just the start of this growing space.We coined the Social Media Management Systems market and started the first industry list in March, 2010 (read all the posts on this topic). Over the past few quarters, we worked closely with Altimeter Research’s Andrew Jones, and we’ve compiled over 13,000 pieces of data about vendors and what buyers need, case studies, and dozens of interview notes. Our experience helping 3 global companies make decisions on these SMMS vendors has helped us to realize the struggle the entire industry is going to have when it comes to keeping track of this fast-moving space. This report, which is a snapshot in time, documents the industry, and we’ll continue to publish changes in this space over the coming years.

Above Graphic: First, Align by the Five Use Cases for Social Media Management.
Above Graphic: Then, Choose The Right Social Media Management Systems based on Business Needs.

Open Research: Use it, share it, and we’ll publish more.
While there are many types of decision-making reports on the market, this one is unique for the following reasons: 1) We realize that one size does not fit all and we do not lump all vendors into one diagram; instead we segment by use case to show different capabilities, 2) Rather than focusing on enterprise class only, we include those that can serve medium-size companies, as this space is dynamically changing, 3) We publish under Open Research so it can be read by all, rather than sold by subscription, and 4) We disclose our client relationships, including vendors that are clients that were in this report, so you have the utmost confidence in our recommendations.

During the editing process, we pulled out pages and pages of content in the editing process, so expect many future blog posts, webinars, and speeches to continue this discussion.

Related Resources
In the following section, we cross-link to thoughtful reviews of the research report. We look forward to comments from those in the community.

I most appreciated the 5 Use Cases–that’s a very helpful frame for defining and differentiating SMM objectives. But I found myself struggling to fit many of the B2B companies we work with into one of those cases. These companies need systems to support targeted engagement–specific and differentiated market segments that need consistent engagement with strategically directed content and useful metrics beyond followers and likes. This use case requires more focus on intelligence and analytics, rather than just monitoring and coordination of engagement. I’m not sure if you’d see that as a different use case, or how you’d see it fitting into one of the existing cases… Thanks, Jeremiah, for another solid paper.